Love, Courage, Strength
by The Laughing Phoenix
Summary: Steady hands, broad shoulders, endless patience, kind eyes and soft smiles. An exploration of strength in its subtler incarnations.


Love, Courage, Strength

Summary: Steady hands, broad shoulders, endless patience, kind eyes and soft smiles. An exploration of strength in its subtler incarnations, written for my favorite 44%. Happy New Year to you, Rosie.

**The Laughing Phoenix** does not own the Avengers, sadly, and receives no monetary compensation for this work.

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_Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage._

_-Lao Tzu_

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"Now, if we twist this wire…here…and do _this_," the toy lit up and spun, and Tony grinned at the little girl in the bed, clapping her hands. "You ready to try?" She shook her head, shyly, cap sliding a little on her bare scalp, as Tony held out the pieces. "Yeah you are, come on, give it a try." She reached out slowly, then carefully began to repeat the steps Tony had done. "There you go, that's it."

Tony watched as she reassembled his work. It was such a stupid, simple thing, the sort of distraction he'd been able to throw together as a toddler, but it made the kid happy. God knew that she needed it, on the Pediatric Oncology ward. He was probably in for an earful from Pepper anyways, given that he'd ditched the opening of the Stark Ward going on downstairs, so he could linger a bit longer.

The toy lit up again, as did the girl's face. "Attagirl," Tony said, holding up a hand. "High-five!" Giggling, she high-fived him, then turned back to the small collection of wires, twisting and untwisting the loop that turned on the current. Making a mental note to prod R&D's medical people some, Tony stood. "I'm going to go visit a few more people on the floor, okay?"

Hands in his pockets, Tony wandered down the hall. No matter how many warzones and hospitals he was in, seeing kids hurt and sick never got easier. The worst part was that there was nothing he could do here, no enemy he could take down. His only option was distracting them a little, making them forget how depressing the place was. Tony tapped on another room's door, slipping in. Lucky he'd always been good at being distracting.

When Pepper and Steve found him an hour later, Tony was sitting at the bedside of a boy with leukemia, digging around in the innards of an old-fashioned alarm clock and chattering a mile a minute. The boy was talking right back, hands waving for emphasis, occasionally pausing to tuck his IV line out of the way.

Steve leaned against the door frame, exchanging a fond glance with Pepper as they waited for Tony to notice them.

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To his credit, Steve had been minding his own business. Sitting on the couch in the living room, sketchbook open on his knee, he was thoroughly lost in the world of charcoal and pencil when somebody dropped into the seat next to his, then leaned into the arm he was using to support his sketch.

Ginger hair brushed his nose when he turned to look, and Steve had to smile a little. It appeared he'd completely missed Pepper's entrance, as that her bag was sitting on the coffee table next to his box of pencils and her shoes had been unceremoniously dumped by the door. Shifting a little, he nudged her head into his shoulder, smiling at the soft grumble. Careful not to jostle her, he went back to drawing, carefully shading his sketch of Tony playing with Dummy.

Twenty minutes later, Pepper drew in a long breath and sat up, brushing strands of hair from her face. "Thank you Steve," she said, then leaned into him again to get a good look at the sketch. "Oh, that's lovely."

"They were shooting hoops this morning," he told her, handing her the sketchbook. Pepper turned a few pages, a fond smile spreading over her face, then went back to the one he'd spent the afternoon on.

"When you finish this, is it okay if I put it up in the lab?"

Steve raised an eyebrow. "Tony won't like it."

"Tony," Pepper said primly, "will fuss, but he'll leave it up." She flashed him a slightly wicked smile. "Particularly if we show it to Dummy first."

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Natasha had never met someone who thought as little of himself as Bruce Banner did. She'd done her homework on the way to collecting him, catching herself up on his movements. He'd disappeared well, blending in with the sea of humanity in Kolkata's slums; offering medical care had been a risk. That he'd gone ahead and done it anyway suggested he felt the need to be useful, to provide a service to the greater population.

As she got to know Bruce, from the Chitauri incursion and after, Natasha realized she'd only been partially correct. Even after settling semi-permanently in Stark Tower (or Avengers tower, she supposed, given Stark's renovations), Bruce kept vanishing on occasion, turning up in the poorest or most dangerous areas of the world, treating anybody who asked. When in New York, he donated to Doctors Without Borders and other charities and designed cheap water purifiers and safer cookstoves.

The look on Bruce's face when Tony quietly went and patented some of his designs, then arranged for their mass production and distribution at refugee camps and relief stations, had taken her breath away.

It had taken Natasha two months to realize that Bruce felt the need to atone for some unspecified sin, that his drive to help came from a need to make up for his mistakes. It took her another six months to figure out why she found the man himself so damn attractive.

Humming softly to herself, Natasha wrapped her hands around her mug of coffee, watching the usual barely organized chaos that was breakfast with the Avengers. Thor and Tony were avidly staring at the coffeepot, waiting for it to finish brewing, while Clint perched on the counter and Steve tried to scoot past them all to reach the fridge. The coffee maker beeped twice, and Tony lunged for it, snatching up the pot, then looking around for a mug.

"Tony," Bruce called, holding up a pair of mugs. At the billionaire's 'gimme' gesture, he passed them over, inadvertently allowing Natasha to appreciate his ass. Clint, seeing the direction of her stare, raised an eyebrow at her.

Undaunted, she raised one right back. It'd take time for Bruce to become comfortable enough to even consider a relationship, but she could wait. It would be well worth the effort.

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Empirically speaking Clint may have had the best vision on his team, but when asked who had the best sight he'd have named somebody else. There was, as he once explained to Natasha one drunken evening, a difference between seeing and Seeing. He could do the former: sight a target, find weaknesses in his opponents, mark the path of a projectile. When it came to the latter – watching plans unfold and predicting the next three moves, catching patterns in disparate events, finding potential in the unlikeliest of people – well, that was something he was still working on. Between the various members of the team the Avengers managed well enough, but Clint had met maybe a half-dozen people in his lifetime who could See properly, and none of them were on the team.

That Fury was one of them surprised all of nobody. Hill wasn't bad at it either, but as far as Clint was concerned the best was Phil. (Yeah, he was biased. Didn't make it any less true.) It was Phil who'd seen a hero in a mouthy sniper who favored an archaic weapon. It was Phil who'd seen the wider potential in a half-wild assassin once Clint had brought her in, even if he didn't like it much at the time.

Even as he'd learned to trust Phil's sight over their years as handler and asset, Clint had learned to watch Phil's eyes. Often, they were the only way to tell what Phil was really thinking behind those bland smiles and crisp suits he wore like a tac uniform. It was where Clint'd caught the fondness growing back around the time Tony Stark came out as Iron Man, which had finally given him the courage to approach Phil as maybe something more.

Six weeks after the whole debacle with the Tesseract (four after Fury called them into his office and told them Phil had against all odds survived the experimental treatment) Phil opened his eyes again, fully aware. Clint watched the way his eyes softened when they made eye contact, and something in his chest relaxed.

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After what feels like a lifetime of trying to stay out of the hands of unscrupulous organizations, Bruce has gotten good at reading the thoughts behind a person's facial expressions. When he factors the tension around the eyes and jaw to the movement of the eyes, he has a pretty good formula for gauging both the truth in a person's words and how much danger they pose him. There are exceptions (and wouldn't it just figure that there are so many in SHIELD), but as a general rule, he thinks he's got a working methodology.

So when he meets the rest of the team (his team, and he can't get over how odd it feels to be part of a group again) he spends a little extra time simply watching them out of the corner of his eye, determining a baseline.

Tony and Pepper are the first he analyzes, simply because he's around them the most. Both have a rock-solid set of public masks, serious expressions and 'try me, bastard' expressions and a particular smile that says they're at their most dangerous. Pepper's is sweet, Tony's laughing, and Pepper's scares Bruce more. When they're together, though, the masks are put away, and it's oddly restful to watch.

Steve's 'public' face tends to be more serious, the weight of the shield lending extra gravity to his behavior. Away from the cameras, he looks ten years younger and the first time Bruce catches him laughing with Tony and Pepper he forgets how old the man really is. Similarly, Clint is always watchful, always serious, and sheds years like cobwebs when he really laughs.

Thor tends to wear his emotions on his face, and given his irrepressible good humor Bruce suspects that when he finally approaches old age his laughter will carve lines into his cheeks. It's a nice change from the more overt armor of the others. Thor can be serious when the occasion calls for it, but there's too much energy in him to hide it for long.

Natasha though…Bruce isn't an idiot, he knows that he makes Natasha nervous (and with good reason, given that the Other Guy nearly killed her not twenty-four hours after they met) and it's nearly a year before he gets to see what's behind that porcelain-smooth mask. When he does, at the small dinner they've thrown for Clint's birthday, after the cake has been passed around and Clint's somehow managed to get frosting on his nose, his breath catches. Natasha is laughing as she reaches across the table with a napkin, and she is incandescent. Bruce watches her as subtly as he can for the rest of the meal, and doesn't think he's exaggerating too much when he compares the soft smile on her face to a Madonna's.

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The prompt was a single word: Strength. Love appeared on the scene, and liberties were taken.

I had a plan for this fic. And then the characters took it out of my hands and walked off in another direction entirely, leaving me to follow along behind. Uh…oops?


End file.
